Great news, good news, good news, dissapointing news.

Ok so disappointing news first. My Mech hand doesn’t work so well. Essentially when designing these prints I need to leave a gap between the parts, to avoid them fusing. With shapeways SWF this is 0.5mm. Now for a simgle joint this is fine. For the bar linkage mechanism, this was fine. However once I added the servo linkage mechanism, the combined wiggle room of all the joints, combined with SWF granularity, and positioning of one of the joints, essentially lead to a juddery sticky finger movement that would get jammed if the hand closed the whole way. I know how I can fix things, and improve matters, but I don’t have the disposable cash that I used to.

Ok so the 2 pieces of good news are that I printed out two artistic designs that work nicely. One is a small Atlas figurine, holding a globe, that I made in Zbrush. This is really a rather neat little model, and I’ve already had interest in it.

The second art piece is a Robot hand phone dock. Now admittedly this holds the phone ok, but there isn’t a mechanism to hold the usb cable, but one should be able to fit. I think I’ll update the file later to include this, and test it later.

Ok so the great news is that I’ve started work on a new hand with Easton LaChappelle. He’s the guy who built the glove controlled robot arm, which has been on quite a few news sites and featured in places like Popular Mechanics. I’m desigining the parts for 3D printing. It should be highly functional and with an organic shape. It’s also on a firmer financial footing than my project so far, which is a relief.